Tag Archives: filmmaking

Film Courage:What is a high concept movie idea? It’s something that has been brought up a handful of times in our interviews. We know it can be an elusive topic. Here is the best of what we have, hope you find it helpful.

Douglas Trumbull painstakingly crafted the visual effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Faced with an impossible timeline, him and his team completed more composites in six months than both Star Wars & Close Encounters of the Third Kind combined.

The first Star Trek film is often jokingly referred to as ‘The Slow Motion Picture’, and this sequence revealing the refitted Enterprise for the first time is by any reasonable standards hugely overlong. But honestly… I love it!

The Collection is a short documentary about two friends, DJ Ginsberg and Marilyn Wagner, and their discovery of an astonishing and unique collection of movie memorabilia, comprised of over 40,000 printer blocks and 20,000 printer plates used to create the original newspaper advertisements for virtually every movie released in the United States from the silent period through 1984, when newspapers stopped using the letterpress format.

The collection, which spans nearly the entire history of the film industry from the silent era to 1984, was recently appraised at ~$10 million and is available for acquisition. (via Kottke)

What appeals to me about this story is less the collection itself, and more the opportunity to enjoy a project like this! To unpack all of these plates, clean them, print them, catalog them… Fun! One day I hope I make a similar discovery.

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A video essay exploring how Star Wars’ editors recut and rearranged Star Wars: A New Hope to create the cinematic classic it became.

This RocketJump video essay has been doing the rounds, but it’s well worth watching if you haven’t seen it. It is full of examples that demonstrate the power of editing and includes some quality Star Wars trivia and fascinating deleted scene footage.

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Alan Warburton:It’s 2017 and computer graphics have conquered the Uncanny Valley, that strange place where things are almost real… but not quite. After decades of innovation, we’re at the point where we can conjure just about anything with software. The battle for photoreal CGI has been won, so the question is… what happens now?

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The Royal Ocean Film Society:I’ve been asked a lot what the process of making these essays is like, but rather than just droll on about recording voiceover, late night editing sessions, and falling into despair upon seeing the first cut, I want to take these few minutes to talk about how that working process has evolved creatively over the past year, and about where I’m trying to take these essays in the future.